Nearly every roll consists of making a single d20 roll, plus a modifier, against a target number. Saving throws have been replaced with Defenses that work like AC; the term 'Saving Throw' now refers to a 55% (DC 10) roll every turn to recover from a persistent effect.

Chargen is simplified compared to 3rd Edition (although still time consuming). Skills are all-or-nothing, you either have training in them or you don't. Each character gains a selection of Powers which can be used at will, once per encounter, or once per day, in ascending order of power. These abilities often consist of an attack plus some special effect, such as knocking someone prone, setting them on fire, or moving yourself or your opponent. There are also five possible alignments, none of which have much effect on gameplay any more: Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned, Evil and Chaotic Evil.

Gameplay is divided into encounters. The GM selects monsters and traps up to a total experience value as recommended for the size of the party, and the encounter plays out as a tactical miniatures game. Non-combat encounters consist of "skill challenges", where skill checks (sometimes of multiple types) are made in sequence. XP is awarded for non-combat challenges and quests, as well as for combat encounters.

Each character can take one standard action (such as an attack), one move action, one minor action, and any number of free actions per turn. Each character also gets one immediate interrupt or immediate reaction per round, which may be used outside of the regular turn order. Generally each character will use their standard action to make use of an attack power. Characters are highly specialized as noted above, and fit into combat roles of controller (status effect and mass-attack focused), defender (durability and counter-attack focused), leader (buffing and healing focused), and striker (single target damage focused).

Characters level up from level 1 to 30; with the scope of the game changing every ten levels. At level 30 characters are expected to undergo some form of apotheosis, but the game is totally broken at this level anyway. Hey, at least this is one thing it has in common with D&D!

All-in-all, 4e has been compared to vidya like World of Warcraft and all that shit, which shouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if it wasn't oddly stiffing in a mild way. Order of the Stick summed this up perfectly in their limited edition Dragon Magazine book; the 4e team relies on spacing and managing cooldowns and per-battle abilities, while the 3.5 team just blows all their gold and spell slots on as many game-breaking potions and spells as they want before standing atop a hill and whoring the fuck out of arrows and magic traps.

The setting of 4e is highly generic and designed to give the DM a relatively blank canvas to paint on. This default setting consists of a wild medieval landscape in which isolated human and demihuman communities ('Points of Light') struggle to survive after the fall of a greater empire. This provides an explanation for the large areas of wilderness and many ruins for monsters to hide in, and the need for adventurers as opposed to more regulated militias.

The Planescape cosmology, present in 2e and 3e, has been removed, and a much vaguer "Astral Sea" cosmology has been put in its place. Sigil still exists as the center of the multiverse. The new Astral Sea or "The Plane Above" is an amalgamation of the Ethereal Plane and the Astral Plane (including the floating corpses of dead gods and primordials). The Astral Sea contains the realms of the gods, including Celestia, Pandemonium, Carceri, Baator, Gehenna (formerly known as Tytherion), Acheron (Chernoggar), Arcadia (Hestavar), Arborea (Arvandor), and a few new ones.

Then there's the Elemental Chaos, "The Plane below", which is kind of like a combination of the Inner Planes and a bit of Limbo, slapped together into a realm of destruction and elemental power. This is where the Primordials resided before the Dawn War, and is the location of the Abyss.

The DMG contains an extensive section explaining the tropes of the setting and how they might be used, and also suggesting ways in which the DM can deviate from them to make the setting his own.

D&D Essentials was an attempt to appeal to players more comfortable with older editions of D&D. It featured classes more similar in structure D&D 3.5, but still using the structure of character powers to attempt to maintain the modular nature of D&D 4e.

Since its announcement 4e has been a source of controversy and trolling on /tg/. Its supporters consider it to have made D&D simple and fun. Its critics have numerous objections to the system and setting, often referring to it as 'shit twinkie' (with the implication that they had been expecting a certain type of D&D goodness and sorely disappointed by what was actually delivered). More cogent arguments against 4th Edition by people not out of their fucking minds tend to decry 4th over some of its perceived issues (character homogenization, signed-in-blood role reinforcement, et al).

/tg/ being /tg/, it is virtually guaranteed that any discussion of 4th Edition will result in Rage between 3e, 4e, and 5e supporters, and ergo, result in the entire thread being reduced to a pile of burning trollery within a few minutes.

Though /tg/ frequently jokes that they don't actually exist, 4th has some legit fans as demonstrated by the supposed high sales figures floating around the web. (Though those are supposedly from the game's launch when people were looking at it out of curiosity. Later sales figures were reportedly terrible, with reports that hardcover books sold in the low hundreds. That Pathfinder passed it, and the relatively quick announcement of 5e kinda proves that it was a failure.)These fabled creatures are spoken of in whispered legends across the imageboards, and there are many rumors of these "fans", but most reports say that they are mostly nice folk who recognize the game's flaws but still want to play and share it with people for fun, making them either a very tragic folk or just... Folk. The fanatic, ferocious 4efag or "4rry" may be a rare breed, but one to be wary of! It is said that logic and previous editions bounce off its thick and gnarly hide, and that the best way to escape alive is to wave a D&D Insider subscription to their nose, chuck it in the other direction, and run, but not before you pick a god and pray. This doesn't matter anymore because they are no longer supported nor the new edition so 4e can safely be discarded as some mad man's fever dream now.

The most dedicated unpaid fanwork based on 4e would be the Touhou Power Cards, although it's difficult to say whether these weeaboo fags are using Touhou to be 4e fans, or 4e to be Touhou fans, or perhaps using Touhou as an overly-elaborate satire of the 4e concept of class powers. It's likeliest the second, as Touhou fans cannot enjoy anything else without tying it in to their bullet hell shooter. Of course, there's always one thingtwo things that have been far worse with this phenomenon....